A black comedy with bite and heart, Book Week establishes director Heath Davis as one of Australia’s best filmmaking talents, while providing character actor Alan Dukes with a breakthrough of a performance sure to be one of the year’s best.

Self-destructive characters are often the most interesting. Those rogue gallery of fuck-ups notoriously portrayed by the likes of Billy Bob Thornton, Paul Giamatti and Larry David (among others), are so loathsome and awkward that it is hard not to watch as they crash and burn with the same velocity as smashing a head against a wall. They would almost be sympathetic if they were not so entertainingly pitiful.

Add Nicholas Cutler to that list. Played by Alan Dukes in Book Week, he is a character with intelligence and charisma to spare. He is also aptly described by one character as a “fucking nightmare”. Although his trade is that of a teacher at a public school in the Blue Mountains, Nicholas so direly wants to resume his career as a writer, with his one novel well received yet his once ascending stardom crashed and burned thanks to his less than stellar people skills.

The character was originally written for Brendan Cowell, who had to pull-out due to scheduling conflicts. Character actor Alan Dukes stepped in, and in doing so delivers one of the best performances in an Australian feature this year, diving into the scoundrel nature of Cutler while hitting those black than black comedic notes with smirk and precision. Cutler is a character we love to hate, and hate that we love, and this is made possible by Dukes’ fantastic handle of the character. Great too is Susie Prior as Lee Issen, the long suffering “girlfriend” of Cutler and Principal of his school, whose trust in Cutler betrayed one time too many.

The writer and director of Book Week is Heath Davis, who turned many a head with his feature debut Broke. While Book Week is lighter fare, it is never the less an effective and entertaining riff on how talent and ego can corrupt the heart and soul of many a man. Davis brings a sharp, dark wit to his film, but also plenty of heart as well. Blending these elements and doing it as well as Davis does in Book Week is quite the feat.